[vfio-users] Troubleshooting PCI Pass-through

[Nicolas Roy-Renaud]

Make sure to quote what's already been said next time. Makes it more 
conveinient to follow.

> It's pretty well guaranteed that a 500 series GeForce does not support
> UEFI.  AFAIK, there's not a terribly high success rate with these cards
> either.  The 600 series are generally what I consider the bottom end of
> working reasonably well.  Otherwise there's not really enough
> information in your report to provide any specific advice.  Thanks,
>
> Alex
I don't think there's much to report, unfortunately.

The problem is that VFIO passthroughs are made possible by a number of 
features and protocols introduced in the UEFI spec, which wasn't really 
needed on GPUs or anywhere back in 2010, when the GTX 500 series was 
released. When Windows 8 introduced secure boot, UEFI support accross 
the board became a requirement for most OEM PCs, so the vast majority of 
the hardware relased after that point supports it. Since secure boot had 
been making the news for a few months before that, I'm guessing the 
hardware manufacturers had also been given the heads up, so a number of 
600 series card probably support it as well, like Alex said. Don't quote 
me on that, though, I'm looking things up as I go.

If you really want to be sure on whether or not your GPU is UEFI 
compatible and you've already tried looking up the exact model on 
TechPowerup's database 
<https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/?architecture=NVIDIA&manufacturer=&model=GTX+570&interface=&memType=&memSize=> 
(it's not perfect, everything listed for my card says it's not EFI 
compatible), see if you can boot on a version of windows with EFI 
support (Windows 7+). If GPU-Z 
<https://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/SysInfo/GPU-Z/> detects your BIOS 
as UEFI compatible 
<https://hardforum.com/proxy/CKbSwA7n6I5vsWEN4M2hTs55Y2dEZAJiZ36gQuBpqPdTuA%3D%3D/image.png>, 
then you're in luck, but I wouldn't count on it.

The point is, that card most probably won't work as a guest card. You 
could use it on the host, but you'd have to get a new card for the 
actual passthrough.

-Nicolas

On 2016-08-12 15:14, gerson moises wrote:
> Dear Mr. Alex WIlliamson,
>
> I have asked before about problems using Ubuntu and Windows as guests for PCI Pass-through.
> As Mr. Alex said, the success rate of GTX 570 cards is not high. However, I would like to know how can I make a detailed troubleshooting in this case for report purposes, I mean is there a way I can find the cause of the problem by checking KVM or kernel logs ? I am still a beginner in this area.
>
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